Reem Hamadaqa is among 70 Palestinian students accepted into Canadian graduate programs who are unable to leave Gaza due to the Israeli siege and genocide. The students are calling on the Canadian government to defend their right to education.
I had always believed that education was my lifeline. Pursuing higher education is a means to resist, to survive, and to preserve the stories of my people. I have always seen myself in classrooms and libraries, surrounded by professors and peers, working toward a future fruitful of research and education after years of study and dedication. Then, in a single night, everything collapsed.
The sudden shift between February and October 2023 still puzzles me. How can one go from a university desk full of potential and academic ambition to an inhumane hospital bed, deprived of medical care, prevented from undergoing urgent surgery, and panicking over the loss of her family? Thoughts wandered in my head.
An Israeli airstrike killed my parents, my sisters, among fourteen beloved people of my family, dearest than my soul. I survived. I got injured. And I was forced to stay in a hospital bed with no certainty of safety, yet unable even to walk steadily. My mother died believing I was safe. She did not know that I had been denied urgent surgery, and that my dreams were suspended in a war I could not control. She died believing I was on my way to finishing the academic path she once proudly encouraged.
Yet even in that chaos, I refused to stop. I wrote, studied, and applied myself to every course I could complete from my tent in Al-Masawi. Electricity was no longer a term we could brag about, and the internet was unreliable, yet I went on. My grades remained high. My master’s coursework continued, with a 90.2% GPA. I did not allow the ruins around me to erase my purpose. My two sisters were denied their right to life, to education, to simple dreams. I had to go on, for them, and for me. (more...)
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